The look and feel is pretty close to other newer isometric RPGs like Wasteland 2&3 or ATOM RPG. If you liked those Encased might be for you as well. The good: The story is pretty unique and the game allows for a variety of different play-styles. Combat system is solid, just make sure that you are decently skilled in at least one type of weapons or the fights will get frustrating. The graphics look good for an Indy game and I didn't encounter any technical difficulties in ~40 hours playtime. The meh: The pacing is slow, especially at the beginning of the game. At lot of the dialogues are forgettable and often your choices barely influence the progress of the story. Snooping around and poking into every container adds loot and XP but gets boring eventually as there are so many of them. You also can get relic artifacts as results of quests or tough fights but most of them are rather underwhelming. Be cautious when building your character - the are very few chances to permanently modify base stats later on via perks. Best approach for me with this type of RPG - create a character, play a few hours, start fresh with a build that supports the intended play-style, as the impact of certain choices is not obvious at the beginning.
After about 20 hours in I can honestly say that this is a good game - so thanks Team FOLON for the massive amount of work you've put in. The initial experience was rough, the game crashed every few minutes but after the first patch it runs very stable on my (medium spec) PC. The world is big, there is a lot to explore, it feels like a real FO game. However, there are still some technical issues that sour the experience: 1) the loading times (especially the transition to outside London) are extremely long, even with a fast M.2 SSD it occasionally takes more than a minute 2) it's very easy to break quests. You explore a bit, you stumble into the wrong location or do something not in the expected order and important quests can't be finished (occasionally not even with the debug console). The best strategy seems to be to stick to the quests and not snoop around too much on your own. A lot of areas are pretty empty anyway and you avoid messing up future quests.
The good: When this game shines, it shines bright. It has interesting quests with a good dose of humor. The world is huge, with decent variety and is fun to explore. The graphic style and music are gorgeous. All skills and spells are available to any class, so you can build your hero without restrictions. The bad: Combat is an essential part of games like DD, but some areas are just unnecessary "grindy". Killing hundreds of enemies to clear a dungeon starts to feel like work after a while. Unfortunately, especially the late stages of the game are pretty tedious and boring. The game is from 2002, so I expected some technical issues with modern OS. I got the unofficial Direct3D fix which resolved stuttering and long loading times. However, the game still crashed every couple hours, so saving often is advised. The ugly: Some cut scenes crashed the game reliably and only switching to software rendering allowed me to continue playing. Even worse, I encountered two game breaking bugs that forced me to replay large chunks of the game as it was not possible to advance the main story. Such bugs can happen pretty easily (e.g. killing an important enemy the wrong way), so be sure to create manual save games every few hours, especially before entering new areas. Conclusion: still a very good game. Minus one star for the bugs and technical glitches, minus one star for the grinding and the atrocious end game.
I liked the atmosphere and graphics of Stasis and Cayne and the point-and-click adventure mechanics worked pretty well for these games, so I didn't hesitate to back the campaign for Beautiful Desolation. Unfortunately, it seems the budget was mostly spent on artwork and music (which are beautiful). With the rest, only a thin layer of game play could be implemented on top, making it more a very slow moving graphical novel than a game. The sceneries lack interesting content, you can't interact with most objects. The game play consist mostly of running around and poking into every corner to eventually find that one object you need to progress the story. To quote Gordon Ramsay - 'It's bland beyond bland'. I don't mind that the dialogues are pretty clunky and feel a bit cheap, it's an Indy game after all. However, the storytelling is inconsistent and confusing at times which is a big no for a point-and-click adventure. Summary: play the demo first - game play: 2 stars - story: 2 stars - music and artwork: 4 stars
I've played Thief 1 and 2 back in the day and had fond memories of the experience - and while Thief 2 is still a brilliant game, re-playing Thief Gold wasn't as much fun as I had hoped for. The game has some good levels where the stealth core mechanics really shine. You sneak around, avoid guards and traps, pick some pockets and explore interesting and challenging locations, always on the lookout for loot and secrets. Sadly, for every good level there is also a bad level where you wander around huge maze-like maps and getting through those missions was more tedious work than enjoyable experience for me. Some missions are more dungeon-crawler than stealth game and while those add variety, they somewhat feel out of place. If you want to play the game for nostalgic reasons and don't mind a bit of frustration go for it. Otherwise start directly with Thief 2 - it retains all good aspects of the first game but has significantly improved level design.
This is a good game and I had fun with it but I always had the feeling that it could have been one of the best open world games with a bit more effort and some tweaks in the right places. The world is large, has a lot to explore and (although it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland) has enough variety - you always know roughly where you are. The car combat and improving and customizing your ride is fun. This is not a racing simulation though, so vehicle physics are not too realistic. The hand-to-hand combat is fluent and can be very satisfying but lacks variety. Most of the time you are fighting the same hordes of enemies and while in theory there are a lot of different enemy types, most of the time it hardly matters. Only occasionally you come across some high level or boss type opponent to spice things up. As many other reviews have noted, the game becomes repetitive too quickly. The main reason for this is the lack of interesting story missions. There are not too many story missions anyway and half of those are simple 'fetch this' or 'clear this' quests. This leaves you with just a handful of unique and interesting missions at the start and end of the game and a ton of generic game-play in-between.
